TV Guide Trivia from 1959

During the 1950s and 1960s, TV Guide featured a minimum of two pages of news blurbs related to television programming and television personalities. Many of these blurbs were word through the Hollywood grapevine, some reprinted from Variety and Broadcasting magazine. While these items are of historical note, sometimes providing the reasoning for programming changes or unusual casting, a number of blurbs provide us with fascinating trivia.

 

Reprinted below are a number of those news blurbs from 1959, for programming decisions that never happened. Information in Italics is from me, clarifying what did happen during the course of events.

 

June 13, 1959

Have Gun – Will Travel will film four shows in Mexico this summer, another four or five in Hawaii. If the location jaunts are successful, the show next year will travel to Japan, Asia and Europe. 

 

June 6, 1959

Richard Carlson goes into production in June with another 39 episodes of Mackenzie’s Raiders. (A second season never went into production.)

 

May 30, 1959

Ed Sullivan trying to line up Marlene Dietrich and Orson Welles to do their magic act for the show he’s taking to Moscow next August. The Russians, in return, offered Ed choice of six acts for the special he’s to tape in Moscow for televising here in September.

 

March 28, 1959

Bat Masterson will be stretched to a full hour on Monday nights.

 

February 14, 1959

Jack Oakie is now weighing offers for two different series. The Fat Man and Uncle Sidney. No decision yet.

 

May 9, 1959

Constance Bennett now goes into the projected Mother is the Governor of Texas series, originally planned for Helen Traubel.

 

May 23, 1959

Polly Bergen preparing “The Enchanted Cottage” as a 90-minute TV special.

 

May 16, 1959

Rock Hudson and Joan Crawford may star in a 90-minute special based on Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock. 

 

April 4, 1959

With nine shopping months until Christmas, there’s a Christmas special in the works. Burl Ives in “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” The producers see it as a yearly affair.

 

October 17, 1959

Kathy (THE REAL McCOYS) Nolan and Hugh (WYATT EARP) O’Brian are working up an act that they’d do for TV guest shots. Idea for the act was born when, by coincidence, they appeared at state fairs together last summer.

 

October 3, 1959

Richard Boone will finish filming this season’s batch of HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL episodes in January, will then turn director for two episodes of DEATH VALLEY DAYS, may also direct both a GUNSMOKE and a LINEUP for CBS. 

 

October 3, 1959

Neville Brand, who played Al Capone in the original THE UNTOUCHABLES, and just appeared in DuPont’s BODY AND SOUL, will star in THE SEARCHERS, new series dealing with the Treasury Department’s narcotics division. Test film will be shot in Tokyo this month. 

 

May 23, 1959

Nancy Gates, who plays a man in the first Riverboat episode, may do the role in three more segments of the NBC series.

 

June 6, 1959

If Joan Crawford goes through with plans to do an anthology dramatic series for Pepsi-Cola, it will mark the first time in history a member of the sponsor’s board of directors stars in the sponsor’s show.

 

August 29, 1959

Broderick Crawford has come to the end of the HIGHWAY PATROL road after four years. He’ll do at least 39 episodes of a new series, a Western, which will probably go into production before the snow flies. 

BETTY BOOP'S RADIO PROGRAMS (1932 - 1934)

Betty Boop was a cartoon phenomenon at the time Max Fleischer was producing those black and white 6-minute animated classics for theatrical distribution in the 1930s. Every cartoon was a different concept, with the basic premise that a night club sex kitten would play the lead role. In "Boop-Oop-A-Doop," a villain attempted to compromise her virginity when the ringmaster of a circus massages her legs and suggests she would be fired if she did not submit. In one animated gem, Betty Boop tended the fields on a farm. In "Stopping the Show" (1934), a favorite of mine, she hosted a vaudeville show complete with a variety of act and delivered an impersonation of Maurice Chevalier and another of Fanny Brice. When the Hays Code went into effect in 1934, her sex kitten image was revised to wearing clothing more akin to a housewife. While the early cartoons were clearly remnants of the jazz age, her last cartoon in 1939 attempted to modernize her image with the growing popularity of the swing era. Just watching these cartoons in chronological order reveals a time capsule for the changing times.

A total of 90 animated cartoons were produced and released from 1930 to 1939, more than half of them restored in 2K and released on DVD and BluRay. Ongoing efforts to continue releasing additional shorts, remastered, continue to this day. But amidst the comic strips and merchandising, one of the few aspects of Betty Boop rarely explored are the radio broadcasts of the 1930s. There, Mae Questel (who also voiced the cartoons) voiced the character for a series of 15-minute radio adventures, in two different programs, with other cartoon characters such as Koko the Clown and Ferdinand the Frog. One series was known as Betty Boop's Fables (1932-1933), with a format similar to the cartoons where each episode placed Betty into a different storybook scenario from Jack and the Beanstalk to Cinderella. The other was Betty Boop Frolics (1933-1934), which featured more musical entertainment than stories.

A few months ago all of the radio scripts (for both series) were found and scanned into PDF format, allowing us to create an episode guide for each and every broadcast, including a list of songs performed. This truly is a historical even if some animation fans dismiss the discovery because it lacks visuals.  

DICK TRACY GOES TO WAR

When the Warren Beatty Dick Tracy movie was released in movie theaters in 1990, Bantam Books published a novelization of the screenplay. Max Allan Collins, who wrote the newspaper strip (following Chester Gould’s five-decade run), was commissioned to write three paperback novels – the first an adaptation of the 1990 screenplay. Collins added bits of background and motivation to improve the story, so if you are a fan of the 1990 movie, I recommend you seek out the paperback and enjoy reading a better rendition.

 

Collins’ second and third novels were Dick Tracy Goes to War (1991) and Dick Tracy Meets His Match (1992). Where the film novelization was set vaguely in the Depression-era 1930's, and Goes to War took place in late 1942 and Meets His Match was set late 1949. Over the past week I read Dick Tracy Goes to War and essentially an original novel, it utilized plot elements and characters from several different wartime storylines in the newspaper strip. Like the previous novel and the film from which it derived, Goes to War pits Dick Tracy against a coalition of many different foes, rather than just one or two.

 

Dick Tracy is eager to serve his country in any way he can. But Lieutenant Commander Tracy of Naval Intelligence was needed on the home front, where a wave of wartime racketeering had the city in a deadly grip. As gangsters B-B Eyes, The Mole and the quivering confidence man Shaky try to bleed the city dry, Dick Tracy rushes into battle with his tommy gun blazing. Yet between the town’s toughest gangsters and a slinky seductress named Black Pearl, the crime-stopping hero found himself distracted from the real danger: foreign agents who were zeroing in on a top-secret weapon that could destroy the country. 

 

Max Allan Collins has said that he considers this book his best Dick Tracy work in any medium, and one of his best novels overall. Because it was not a novelization of a pre-existing screenplay and had nothing directly to do with the strip itself, Collins received little editorial interference from Disney Studios and Tribune Media Services, giving him a level of freedom he did not have on any previous Dick Tracy project.

 

As a fan of the Dick Tracy comic strip, I found this novel to be above average and highly recommended. Worth seeking out if you want a good read.